Deadball Poets Society

Stuart Shea: Author and Poet

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By Randy Richardson

Stuart and his wife, Cecilia Garibay, on a recent pub crawlStuart Shea traces the roots of his Cubs’ obsession to when he was eight years old, when his father would write out the highlights of the previous night’s game and leave them on the kitchen table for him to read before he went to work. Sometimes his father would even tape the radio highlights for him.

“You can’t buy that kind of emotional investment,” Shea says.

It is that emotional investment in the Cubs that has compelled Shea to write extensively about the team, including authoring Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography and editing Wrigley Season Ticket 2007.

In 2007, his passions for baseball and the written word collided again but with a poetic twist. He partnered with a likeminded soul, James Finn Garner, author of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, and launched Bardball.com, a Web site devoted to reviving the art of baseball doggerel (a comic verse of irregular measure).

While one might think that baseball and poetry make for an unlikely pairing, Shea says the two have a long history together. “Before TV, radio, widely distributed photography, and recorded music, the popular art form was newspapers,” he notes. “Columnists, and even some beat writers, used to write light verse to illustrate various points about baseball players and games.” Shea cites Franklin Pierce Adams (Baseball’s Sad Lexicon), Grantland Rice, and Ring Lardner as some of the true masters of sportswriting who were known to dabble in short poetry.

Shea and Garner both shared a passion for this old-time baseball verse and decided to resurrect it as an art form.  "We decided to create a Web site where we wrote light verse - and occasionally heavy verse - about the game we love and encourage others to do the same," Shea explains. "Drinking was definitely involved in the conception of the idea, and sometimes is involved in the writing."

One of Shea’s poems, The End?, found its way into Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. It begins: "The Cubs are the best team in baseball. So good your toes may curl. I'm worried that we may be approaching the end of the world."                                               

The Cubs put Shea's worries to rest when they met up with the Dodgers in the postseason and were vanquished in three straight games. But up until October came along, it did seem like 2008 might just be the year and it was all happening in the midst of a world that seemed to be changing, too. "[The End?] was originally written as an homage to [W.P.] Kinsella's Last Pennant Before Armageddon, in which a successful Cubs manager is visited by the obsession that his team winning will result in a conflagration that will bring about the end of the world," Shea explains. "Summer 2008 was feeling like a pretty heavy time politically and emotionally, not just here but in the whole world. It didn't just feel like baseball, but rather that Chicago was the center of some deep stuff."

Although he has a strong emotional investment in baseball, and the Cubs in particular, Shea doesn’t see baseball as anything more than what it is: a game, a point he drives hope at the end of The End?

"Just like in Kinsella's great story, Those in control don't know what to do. All I know is that when we all go, We prob'ly won't bleed Cubbie Blue."

Shea explains: “Quite honestly, baseball just isn’t that important. The Cubs lost in the playoffs, miserably, humiliatingly, and ignobly…but we are still here and we have our loved ones. When the end comes for all of us, I find it difficult to believe that any of us will count being Cubs fans as one of the great things we did for the world or for each other. And I say that having made my living around baseball for most of the last 15 years and obsessing about it for most of my life.”

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Want more Stuart?

• Read "Five Minutes With Stuart Shea"
• Visit his blog, "Baseball, Music, and Real Life" or Bardball.com